Royal Institute of Philosophy
Public Lecture

Professor Tadeusz Szubka (Szczecin University, Poland)

Abstract: In his famous essay “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, published in 1962, the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars vividly described two general conceptions of the world and human beings: the manifest image, which is a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image, which is a theoretical picture of the world provided by current science, or, to be more precise, constructed out of several particular images of special sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience. Sellars urged us to work towards their synthesis by creating one unified synoptic vision of the world. He claimed that in this final synthesis the manifest image cannot be simply replaced by the scientific image. What is needed here is a new conceptual framework within which these two images could be combined. Despite impressive advances made by various sciences in the last fifty years, we are still very far from devising such a framework.

A biographical note on Professor Szubka: Tadeusz Szubka is Professor and Head of the Institute of Philosophy at Szczecin University, Poland. Before moving in 2003 to Szczecin he was for many years a member of teaching staff of Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 1992 and his Habilitation in 2002. He enjoyed several research fellowships in various universities and countries, including Great Britain (University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh), Australia (University of Queensland) and the USA (University of Notre Dame, University of Pittsburgh, Ohio State University). In the academic year 2010/2011, he was a fellow-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.